


Seek a Wolf at Candlemas

by Miss_M



Category: The Company of Wolves - All Media Types, The Company of Wolves - Angela Carter
Genre: Banter, Domestic, F/M, Post-Canon, Power Dynamics, Puns & Word Play, Relationship Negotiation, Werewolves, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28901121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: We keep the wolves from the door by living well.
Relationships: Huntsman/Rosaleen
Comments: 16
Kudos: 17
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Seek a Wolf at Candlemas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobberBaroness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts).



> I own nothing.

It is February, and a long winter. The wind saws like discordant violins between the snow-laden branches, scratches like claws over the roof of granny’s cottage. Rosaleen’s cottage now. The kitchen garden will sprout weeds and cowslips come spring; the rose tree is all black thorns and may never bloom again.

Rosaleen rarely takes the path now when she goes mushrooming or checks her traps. She has become the apparition in the woods that the villagers flee when they catch sight of her among the trees, framed between their mossy trunks like a proper wild thing. She wears granny’s old things, unflattering gowns and long underwear with yellowing lace, for she burned all her clothes at Christmas. Sometimes she misses her red cloak; it was pretty, and she could have spread it over the bed on cold nights when the crescent moon hangs frozen over the cottage. Like tonight. 

The embodiment of the forest lies spent beside her. Her bridegroom has come to her, as he does every month. The rest of the time she spends alone, but at the full moon he comes to court her. Their courtship has fangs and claws, love bites adorning Rosaleen’s limbs and throat. 

Rosaleen knows that she could become a witch if she put her mind to it, but she is busy sweeping out the hearth and gathering the winter forest’s meager bounties, and when he comes to her, she is lazy and achy, for he is ah! huge all over. 

“You wanted her dead,” her bridegroom tells her. “Your sister. That pest. Admit it. You wanted her gone, out of your hair. And she was _delicious_.”

“And me?” Rosaleen asks. She is still fearless. “Do you suppose I’ll be delicious too?”

His yellow eyes dance like the flames in the hearth when he flicks his gaze down her pale form stretched out beside him in granny’s bed. Spittle gleams on his teeth, though he’s not brushed them nor his hair in a month.

“You, I’d want to make last. I haven’t decided about you yet.”

“I haven’t decided yet either,” she counters, and he laughs at her, scratching idly at his hairy chest. 

Rosaleen lets him laugh. They both got what they wanted, but she knows that she can still save herself if she takes it into her head to do so. The bloom isn’t off her rose just yet. She still has a choice, and while her virginity no longer protects her (ah! _huge_ ), keeping him in suspense does. As long as he thinks he’s playing with her, she has a way back, out of the forest. For now. For a few turns of the moon at least.

“Don’t forget about your grandmother,” he taunts her, lounging beside her on her best sheets, with his dirty feet and his scent of loam and blood. 

Rosaleen lifts an eyebrow. “Was she delicious too?”

“No. She was gristly.” He snaps his teeth at her playfully. “Chewy. Old hen, good for the soup.”

“There’s not much of my family left for you to devour,” she replies, stretching.

He goes still, as still as the forest before it pounces and eats you up. “Your father lured my brother with a duck and cut off his forepaw. How then shall we repay each other for all these injuries?”

Rosaleen looks into his yellow eyes and sees that he’ll let her keep him tethered for as long as she likes. The sweetest meat is that which comes to the hunter willingly. 

Emboldened, she rises, displaying her snow-pale nudity to his hungry gaze while she stokes up the fire and goes to the window. His companions’ phosphorescent eyes wink at her from the woodsy stillness, the hush of the coldest part of the year: yellow, red, green, eyes the colors of the fairy lights on a Christmas tree.

She turns to her bridegroom. “Your hands were as cold as ice when you came in. They must be frozen stiff, the poor dears. Shall I let them in?”

He sits up in bed, alarmed and intrigued by her. “They are not all as biddable as me, my dear.”

Rosaleen cocks a look at his muddy footprints by the hearth, his green coat thrown carelessly into a corner. “I think they’ll know to behave. Curiosity won’t kill a wolf.”

The porcelain spaniel on the mantelpiece – one of a pair, for she is more careless when dusting than granny – blinks at her as she puts on her clothes and goes to open the door to the night and the forest. 

We keep the wolves from the door by living well. To cross the threshold and enter the house, they must put on the skins of men. 

In they troop, all in a line, with their long, tangled hair, and their clothes long out of style, and their stench of the hunt. Six of them, plus her bridegroom, they gather around the table where the feast the newlyweds barely nibbled remains on display: most of a goose, an oval dish of potatoes au gratin, a Christmas pudding, bottles of port. The wolves have no home nor do they speak, but they have not lost all of their manners. Their eyes burn like embers as they watch her, polite beasts that wait to be asked to sit down, though it does not occur to them to wash their hands.

Rosaleen is reminded of another story: seven men waiting for a girl to serve them dinner, but her murdering is not on the menu. They’ll rend the goose instead, scatter the pudding crumbs all over her floor, their jaws will snap, their hands will paw hopelessly at the cutlery.

Rosaleen fetches six glasses from the cupboard, granny’s best. She sits at the head of the table, pours them wine. They howl their way through grace and fall upon the food, ravenous yet shy in the presence of a young woman smelling of sex and the wolf, and dressed in an old-fashioned corset and petticoats.

Her bridegroom raises his glass to her, his smile as crooked as the path from which Rosaleen strayed, and would do so again and be glad. She returns his smile and drinks. Her glass overflows, her white petticoat bespattered with red wine drops like blood.


End file.
